[namadany]

My daughter sent me a CD she had burned on her PC. My Mac G-3 won't recongize it and gave me an error of PRODOSOK. I thought Macs could read PC CD's. What's up. What must she do so that I can read her CD's?
Thanks

[drmbb]

Windows uses packet writing for rewritable CD sessions, a format not supported by Apple (actually, an old and outdated CD format anyway). In order for you to read her CD's just use ISO9660 format, which is a universal standard.

[namadany]

Thanks for the information. She is using Windows XP and doesn't know how to format the CD for the so-called "Standard" so that the burned CD can be read on my Mac.

[cosiz]

All you need to do is install the Joliet file extension. It will work in OS 9 only, but you can just boot into OS 9 and install the extension, load the CD and copy the contents to your hard drive before rebooting back to OS X.
http://www.tempel.org/joliet/
Cheers,
Bryan

[Nobody]

The Mac should read Joliet (Windows95 and later) CDs without any additional extensions (though they are usually the 8.3 names instead of long filenames, I've found).
It may be that your daughter is writing multiple sessions on the CD, and not "closing" it. Doing this will cause other users trouble when they try to read the CD (this applies to Macs as well as PCs).
Roxio recommends always "closing" the disk if you need to read it in another computer.
I had a similar situation with a CD that I could not read from a Windows user. When I looked at the disk from within Toast, I found that there were multiple sessions on the disk. Only after the Windows user erased and re-wrote the CD from scratch, was I able to read it on my Mac.
In Roxio Toast (just for example), the options are to: "Write Session" or "Write Disk". Write Disk is what closes it. Write Session adds data to the disk, but leaves it "open" for more data later, but only from the same computer. The wording in WinXP is surely different, but if she is given any options, she needs to choose the one that does NOT allow data to be added later.

[namadany]

Bryan,
Installed Juliet 2.0 on my Mac with 9.2 and the CD still could not be mounted and/or seen. Juliet said that the CD was an ATAPI CD. My daughter is using Windows XP and it automatically burns a CD without asking for a format.
Thanks for your help.

[Waterman]

Ok I do this at work on a PC using win 2000 and EZ cd creator. If she has it, it comes with most burners, have her make a UDF(using a CD-RW) with DirectCD(part of EZ) format utility. It turns a CD into a floppy. It should work.

[cosiz]

In reply to:

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Bryan,
Installed Juliet 2.0 on my Mac with 9.2 and the CD still could not be mounted and/or seen. Juliet said that the CD was an ATAPI CD. My daughter is using Windows XP and it automatically burns a CD without asking for a format.
Thanks for your help.

---

Hmm... ATAPI is an interface between CPU and hard drive, also used for some CD-R drives. I don't recall seeing that referred to before in connection with CD-R media. However, it is supposedly a universal standard. Perhaps these CDs are being burned by XP as some sort of restorable data backups? No, that doesn't sound right, probably just telling you something about the Windows format of the disc.
Anyway, I think 'battman' made a good point. But, it sounds as though your daughter is just using the auto-burn functions in XP and I would expect it to require extra steps to leave an open multi-session CD rather than extra steps to close it. BUT, leave it to MS to copy only parts of the Mac intuitive interface!
I just researched a bit, and it turns out that XP doesn't even have an interface for the burning software! Just the auto-burn functions with no control whatsoever. According to MS, one actually needs 3rd party software just to burn an ISO disk! So MS doesn't think their users really need to work with anyone running OS 9, OS X, or any Unix OS?! And what about older Windows machines?! Sheesh, everytime I start thinking the differences have almost disappeared...!
http://support.micro...om/?kbid=279157

BTW, UDF (Universal Disk Format) is just another ISO type format and XP does not support writing to it without 3rd party software.

I found ISO freeware here:
http://isorecorder.a...isorecorder.htm
which will act as an interface with the existing XP burning software.
Or you can buy new PC burning software like Nero or EZ-CD creator. Might get demos to do what you need, but I saw articles about problems and work-arounds with installing them on XP, so that will be something your daughter will need to check out and possibly tweak to resolve.
I wonder if using Disk Copy (in the Utilities folder of OS X) directly would help? This app is what automatically reads the disk when you load the CD tray, but you can open it manually and try using the "Mount Image" command from the File Menu, or maybe the New>Image from Device commands from that same File Menu. There is also a "Convert" command, but I get the impression you can't even see the disk at all.
After that, I'm out of ideas. Other than using the 3rd party software that is. Good luck to you, and please post back anything new discovered.
Cheers,
Bryan
P.S. Always glad to have a reaffirmation that Macs RULE!

[cosiz]

I was just thinking that hypothetically, it should be possible to include a make-shift file directory in the folders being copied to the XP CD before burning and then use the Mac's Samba client tomount. It seems like you should be able to fool the Mac into mounting it as a shared disk using SMB to read it and just map to the CD drive rather than a file server.
I don't use Samba, and my only experience with XP is at work where we only use proprietary software. But it was just a thought that seemed interesting. If you want to pursue this rather than loading software on your daughter's PC, try searching on sharing config files for SMB on Windows XP and then how to launch Samba client in OS X. Then you would have to tweak to map to the CD drive as the volume to mount.
Probably more trouble than it's worth, but I love a good problem! You could also use Samba to share files directly with one another.
Cheers,
Bryan